Innovation in the Nevada desert 09-08-98

RebeccaLynn Eisenberg

BLACK ROCK DESERT, Nev, (CBS.MW) -- Silicon Valley is famous for its innovation -- especially when it comes to computers and the Internet. Here in the Bay Area, new high-tech startups appear every day, and some of them, from Yahoo! and Netscape to Apple and Cisco Systems, even become profitable. Residents and high-tech workers become rightfully proud, if not wealthy as well.

Still, in all of our talk about retained earnings, revenues, profits and performance, we sometimes forget to pay attention to what lies at the foundation of every successful start-ups: ideas. After all, at the foundation of every innovative company is a product or service newer and better than those that came before it.

Where does all this creativity come from?

Some answers can be found in the heart of uninhabitable and painfully hot Black Rock Desert, Nev., where each year Labor Day weekend, thousands of adventurous creatives -- more than half of whom are said to hail from the Bay Area -- congregate to build a modern and surreal city, then burn it all down.

Named "Burning Man" after the week's closing ceremony where a 40-foot wood and neon structure is torched against the night sky, the 12-year-old tradition attracts some of the most innovative and iconoclastic engineers from the Bay Area and beyond, from robot-machinists Survival Research Laboratories to virtual community pioneers Bianca's Smut Shack, recently acquired by Zapata (ZAP)
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More common than the high-tech companies that set up camp together at Burning Man, however, are the developers who attend the week-long festival in order to create the work that the day-to-day grind, filled with deadlines, overhead limitations and managerial beaurocracy, prevents them from completing.

Pipe, neon, metal and wood

Thus, out in the desert you can find some of the best minds from high-tech giants such as Cisco, Microsoft, Apple and Intel as well as from start-ups you have not heard of (yet), building out of metal, wood, neon and PVC pipe what they wish they could build on their employers' time.

The festival "grants us the freedom to design, create and enact a project without the stupidity and straightjacket of corporate America," explained Ron Avitzur, CEO and president of Pacific Tech, an educational software start-up in San Carlos, California

"I could not have put up this structure at work or in my neighborhood," agreed Anne Church, second-level software engineer at Cisco Systems. "It would not have been accepted. But here it was appreciated."

For her contribution to the Burning Man community, Church built a 10-foot tall Sierpinski gasket out of PVC pipe, wire and developer CD-ROMs she had painted black. The structure represents a repetitive mathematical pattern that emerges from seemingly chaotic systems.

"Within 10 minutes of its completion, people were approaching the structure and asking about it," said Church. "They knew that it was a mathematical object, and recognized the pattern."

Like many Burning Man participants, Church had started work on her project months before the actual event. "Once I heard about Burning Man last year, I knew that I had to do this," she said. "And it all worked out exactly as planned."

Church's sentiments were echoed by hundreds of others, who used the week as an opportunity to design, construct and enjoy exhibits as impressive as a 15-foot functioning tesla coil, to a laser beam that cut across tens of miles onto the mountainside, to an electronic sound array made out of computer-chip-endowed PVC pipes, to a 20-foot high welded swingset and teeter-totter.

It's no wonder that so many engineers, who often are too busy for even a weekend away from work, make time to attend Burning Man - - even if they have to travel there by motorcycle, as did CEO and president of Santa Cruz-based network provider Tycho Networks Inc., Qarin Van Brink, and her business partner Matthew Kaufman.

Avitzur summarized the appeal: "Burning Man embodies the best parts of the hacker ethic ... solving problems for the sheer joy of making things work."

Although this goal often gets lost in high-tech companies' executive board rooms, Burning Man reminds us that without the goal of innovation for its own sake, we'd have no such board rooms at all.

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